The Hill Bros' Top 50 Albums of the 1960s

The 1960s was the best decade for music. It was the era where bands like The Beatles, The Who, and Pink Floyd really created the ALBUM format. Bad music hadn't even been invented yet - even the worst album of the 1960s has its fans. Hell, even country music was good in the 1960s. My bro Al and I decided we'd go ahead and figure out what the FIFTY BEST ALBUMS OF THE 1960S are.

The Process:
We each made a list of our Top 50 1960s albums, in order. We then ranked each other's "unique" lists. This data was then combined using a highly complicated, mathematical process that we used to create our Final Combined List. Then when it was all over we tweaked around with the results a bit because WE CAN.

The List!

50. Captain Beefheart - Safe As Milk (1967)
Al's List Rank (#52)
Ian's List Rank (#43)

We start off with an album of good first impressions -  this is fairly new to both of us.

I suppose I'll spoil it - Beefheart's famous Trout Mask Replica is not on this list. It's cool that it's weird and all, but it just seems like they're trying too hard to sound "bad" on that album. Safe as Milk feels much less like they're trying to be weird, and more like they're a regular band with some great musical ideas.

49. The Stooges - The Stooges (1969)
Al's List Rank (#53)
Ian's List Rank (#36)

The Stooges was Punk Music before Punk Music. OK, granted that the songs on this album are sometimes a bit longer and more exploratory than, say, fellow 1960's proto-Punkers The Sonics, but the attitude is here.

This album was actually one of the changes we made to our list - it would have been #51. But the fear of a 70 year-old Iggy Pop kicking my teeth in brought it up into in top 50.
 

48. The 13th Floor Elevators - The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators (1967)
Al's List Rank (#34)
Ian's List Rank (#55)

Speaking of proto-Punk...this album definitely has some head-banging stuff. It also reminds me of some early 80s post-punk stuff like Black Flag's My War or The Wiper's Youth of America. It's kind of all over really, in a great way. This lo-fi album is probably secretly one of the most influential albums of the 1960s. Sometimes I wonder what this would sound like with some better production (ie bringing the vocals up front), but I bet the magic would be gone.

47. The Beatles - Please Please Me (1963)
Al's List Rank (#58)
Ian's List Rank (#32)

It's my understanding that Please Please Me was the sound The Beatles had when they were a real TOURING band. This is probably accurate, since it reportedly only took a day to record. It's fun to imagine them playing these fun pop-songs in small clubs, and actually being able to hear them without a horrible SCREAMING FEMALE filter over it. My favorite pre-Help! album.

46. The Sonics - Here Come The Sonics (1965)
Al's List Rank (#30)
Ian's List Rank (#62)

It took me a while to really like this one for some reason. Here Come The Sonics is often cited as the extreme early Punk album (I swear this whole list isn't about proto-punk!!!). This is definitely very clear with even a short sampling - the songs are short and fast, and wow it was released in 1965! To me it was always just a historically important album rather than something I actively enjoyed until quite recently when it did that magical thing that albums sometimes do when they become something special on the X'th time you've heard it. Throw this shit on and crank up the dial.

45. Various Artists - Mary Poppins (Original Soundtrack) (1963)
Al's List Rank (#29)
Ian's List Rank (#65)

 When we started compiling this list, I made a NO BEST OF'S rule (this isn't Rolling Stone magazine!!). I forgot to make a NO SOUNDTRACKS rule. I love the use of music in other media as much as anyone else, but I have a hard time properly comparing stuff like the music of something like Star Wars or Final Fantasy VI with traditional albums. Plus, where do you stop? You start with Mary Poppins, but then you throw in The Good the Bad and the Ugly, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Once Upon A Time In The West, and The Great Escape, and now you don't have enough room for nine Beatles albums!!

So when my troll brother threw this on his 50, I wanted to vote it down pretty far....but then you know I went and listened to it and when I got to Jolly Holiday and started crying because it's so good (and also I am insane), I knew it had to make the 50.

44. John Coltrane - A Love Supreme (1965)
Al's List Rank (#71)
Ian's List Rank (#27)

I love how AMBITIOUS this album is. It's a good example of how the more established genre of Jazz also had a revolution of its own in the 60s.

43. Bob Dylan - Blonde on Blonde (1966)
Al's List Rank (#79)
Ian's List Rank (#25)

Every time I listen to this I'm always blown away with how many great songs there are on here.

42. Donovan - Sunshine Superman (1966)
Al's List Rank (#28)
Ian's List Rank (#63)

Sandwiched between our only two Dylan albums (Spoilers!!) is a folk artist of a different kind, Donovan. This album seamlessly moves from folk to pop to melancholy to psychedelia and it's just great.

41. Bob Dylan - Highway 61 Revisited (1967)
Al's List Rank (#75)
Ian's List Rank (#24)

 Like many people, this was the first Dylan album I ever heard. To me, this is very much DEFINITIVE Dylan. It's less sprawling than Blonde on Blonde, but it's also much more to the point. To me, it's saying I AM BOB DYLAN, THIS IS WHAT I DO, AND I AM AWESOME.

40. The Doors - Strange Days (1967)
Al's List Rank (#42)
Ian's List Rank (#35)

We heard a whole heck of a lot of The Doors while growing up, and considering that all of their albums are/will make our lists, we obviously aren't too upset about this. I'd actually say that they were probably one of the most Consistently Good bands of all time - all their stuff is great, and this one is no exception.

39. Nick Drake - Five Leaves Yet (1969)
Al's List Rank (#76)
Ian's List Rank (#23)

 Nick Drake's story is a tragic one - he only released 3 albums which were completely obscure and ignored until long after his death in 1974. Hearing his acoustic sound today, it seems impossible that something so good could have been ignored back then, particularly since that era was particularly folk-driven. I'd imagine his music was buried in all of it. His debut is great, and certainly lives up to his reputation.

38. The Rolling Stones - Aftermath (1966)
Al's List Rank (#27)
Ian's List Rank (#57)

This one is kind of like the Help! of the Rolling Stones - it's both the end and the culmination of their early era.

37. The Beatles - Help! (1965)
Al's List Rank (#57)
Ian's List Rank (#26)

Oh hey speaking of Help!! This one always reminds me of the associated movie - the plot of the movie was really dumb or whatever, but the performances of the songs felt like old, great music videos (because they kind of were). Help! was also one of the first records I ever heard. My friend and I found a turntable, and I somehow acquired this album (I may have stolen it from my parents'?!). We didn't know anything about pre-amps, so we hooked it directly up to my 1990s stand-alone stereo, cranked the volume all the way up, and pressed our ears up against the speakers. I marveled as I heard for one of the first times what would soon forever become my favorite band.

36. Pink Floyd - The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967)
Al's List Rank (#41)
Ian's List Rank (#29)

This one brings up another middle-school era memory for me - my group of friends would claim that Pink Floyd was a bad band, but their first album was still pretty good. I didn't argue with them of course, since they are the people who introduced me to great stuff like Sonic Youth and Yo La Tengo. Obviously later in life I learned that they were half-correct - their first album was indeed AT LEAST "pretty good". Luckily this was only the beginning of their "pretty good" releases.

35. Miles Davis - Sketches of Spain (1960)
Al's List Rank (#54)
Ian's List Rank (#20)

Here's something different from the coolest dude to ever pick up a trumpet - he and fellow Jazz musician Gil Evans attempted to make a very Spanish sounding album, and they absolutely killed it.

34. The Rolling Stones - Let It Bleed (1969)
Al's List Rank (#19)
Ian's List Rank (#53)

 Let It Bleed is one of those rare albums that feels like a Greatest Hits collection. It's pretty crazy that all these very definitive Rolling Stones songs were released on the same day.

33. The Beatles - A Hard Day's Night (1964)
Al's List Rank (#26)
Ian's List Rank (#34)

This is basically Beatlemania - The Album. It's the accompanying album for the movie about Beatlemania, released during the height of Beatlemania. These guys could have stopped making music right here and they'd still be musical gods.

32. John Coltrane - Giant Steps (1960)
Al's List Rank (#45)
Ian's List Rank (#52)

We had to cheat quite a bit on this one - it actually should have been off our list way down at number 61. But that's only because it wasn't until mid-way through our combining process that it hit me how great this album is. It's so fast and aggressive and fun. Also it gets subtle bonus points for clearly being a musical influence to the game Earthbound - not only is the album name used for a location of the game, some of the games' jazzier tunes sound a whole lot like it.

31. The Kinks - Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire) (1969)
Al's List Rank (#17)
Ian's List Rank (#59)

 After the tight, pop-perfection of The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society, it seems The Kinks wanted to stretch out a little bit - there's less songs here, and they are longer and more ambitious.

30. Love - Forever Changes  (1967)
Al's List Rank (#59)
Ian's List Rank (#17)

The (strangely named) opening track Alone Again Or was a song I was "chasing" during my youth. I'm not where where I first heard it - it was likely the punk band The Damned's faithful cover, but the Damned album that it was on is not one I've ever heard. Did I hear it on the radio?! Doesn't seem too likely. But over the years I'd (somehow) run into it every now and then and was always blown away by it. At some point I focused in at the right time and found the name and the origins of the song. Once I had access to the song and the album it was released on, I found that Alone Again Or was just as good as I had remembered and expected. What I did not expect was for it to be on an album that totally lives up to that one song - The Red Telephone, for example, is a song I like even more!

29. The Beatles - Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band  (1967)
Al's List Rank (#64)
Ian's List Rank (#16)

 The Beatles were just all confident and full of ideas at this point - they put on some goofy clothes and started pretending they were some other band, because they thought it would work well for the creative output of their music. I guess it was effective, because this album is pretty fantastic!

28. Cream - Fresh Cream  (1966)
Al's List Rank (#15)
Ian's List Rank (#56)

Cream was a band who were only around for a short time - they released only four albums over the course of four years. These three dudes were full of talent AND ambition.

26. The Moody Blues - Days of Future Passed (1967)
Al's List Rank (#63)
Ian's List Rank (#13)

I've never heard another Moody Blues album. I checked out this one simply because I liked what I'm guessing is the most "popular" song on here, Forever Afternoon (Tuesday?). In fact I think it was its inclusion on some commercial that got me wondering about it. Turns out this whole album is really fantastic, and it uses orchestral sounds quite brilliantly. Maybe I should get around to checking out some more of their stuff!?

26. Serge Gainsbourg & Brigitte Bardot - Bonnie & Clyde (1968)
Al's List Rank (#13)
Ian's List Rank (#50)

I'll never forget the first time I heard the opening title track Bonnie & Clyde - I was at Revolver Records on a Sunday (I always shopped for records on Sundays). This song that sounded like nothing else I'd ever heard shot out of their speakers and I was instantly enthralled. Because I am (was?!) a weird anti-social freak, I didn't do the thing that these music nerds WANT you do ("Oh wow this sounds great; what is it?; let's talk about it!; how much does it cost?"), I quickly left the store, repeating in my head the only English lyrics in the song ("BONNIE AND CLYDE BONNIE AND CLYDE") in order to remember the song so I could hunt it down on the internet at home. While the rest of the album doesn't QUITE live up to the title track (one of my favorite songs of the 60's!), it's really unique and I love it.

25. Nico - Chelsea Girl (1968)
Al's List Rank (#62)
Ian's List Rank (#11)

When I purchased the incredible The Velvet Undergound & Nico, it was a special Deluxe Edition that included the 5 songs from Chelsea Girls that were written by Lou Reed and John Cale, which basically introduced me to half of the album. Years later curiosity (and the inclusion of one of the songs on the movie The Royal Tenenbaums) led me to hearing the entire album, and I really liked it. I found out just recently that the other half of the album was also written by great songwriters like Jackson Browne, Tim Hardin, and Bob Dylan. It seems like these musicians really saw something in Nico, and wanted to hear their music expressed through her unique voice.

24. King Crimson - In The Court of the Crimson King (1969)
Al's List Rank (#51)
Ian's List Rank (#12)

Man this album has such a cool cover. And even cooler gate-fold art. What's also neat is that it was (clearly) a big influence to Steven King's Dark Tower series. Oh, and I love how this album's music is liberally used on one of my favorite shows, Kenny vs. Spenny.

For whatever reason, when I think about this album, my mind goes straight to those other, peripheral thoughts. But the music contained within is equally as great.

23. The Doors - The Soft Parade (1969)
Al's List Rank (#18)
Ian's List Rank (#28)

It's always been my understanding that this has always generally been known as the "worst" Doors album. I've always pretty heavily disagreed with this idea - it's always been an easy shoe-in for Top 3 for me. I'd say I'm just a sucker for those long, medley type songs that this one ends on (I am), but the rest of the album leading up to that final ride is equally as great

22. Miles Davis - In A Silent Way (1969)
Al's List Rank (#70)
Ian's List Rank (#10)

This is the first of a trio of albums that Miles made that is, to me, the IDEAL Jazz sound. It's the sound that got me into the genre in the first place. It's albums like this that make me want to dig deeper into the genre.

21. The Mamas and the Papas - If You Can Believe Yours Eyes and Ears (1969)
Al's List Rank (#10)
Ian's List Rank (#68)

Monday Monday and California Dreamin' are two of the best songs of the decade. The rest of this album isn't too shabby either.

20. The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band - Gorilla (1967)
Al's List Rank (#13)
Ian's List Rank (#50)

While we were in the phase of this project where we reveal our personal Top 50s to each other, Al revealed this album by a band that basically sounds made up. There was a part of me that thought this was just him being PURPOSELY WEIRD. Like "Yeah look at me I like weird shit no one has ever heard!!"

As it turns out, when it was my turn to listen to this, it ended up being my favorite album of his unique list. It's wacky! It's fun! It's all over the genre map! These guys are both creative and talented, and this album is one I'm glad to now call a personal favorite.

19. Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin (1969)
Al's List Rank (#21)
Ian's List Rank (#21)

Led Zeppelin may be thought of as the greatest 70s band, but they came out fully formed in the 1960s with this one.

18. The Zombies - Begin Here (1965)
Al's List Rank (#9)
Ian's List Rank (#67)

Before these guys got more ambitious with 1967's Odyssey and Oracle (my personal favorite of theirs), the had a simpler, more pure pop kind of sound that is represented perfectly here.
 
17. The Who - The Who Sell Out (1967)
Al's List Rank (#22)
Ian's List Rank (#18)

With each album of the 1960s, The Who were leading up to their culmination of the idea of a concept album. This one was a bit of a different take on the idea - rather than the long stories told either previously (A Quick One, While He's Away), or later (the albums Tommy and Quadrophenia), this concept was that this album is a sample of a pirate radio station. This radio station has all of the things that radio stations have like bumpers between songs and commercials. Of course, this particular fictional station only plays Who tunes, but they somehow manage to tweak their sound a bit between songs, making it almost seem like they could be by different bands. Love it.

16. The Who - A Quick One (1966)
Al's List Rank (#11)
Ian's List Rank (#39)

 This album reminds me of their first album, My Generation. It's the band being yet another rock outfit of the mid-60's, but also being a stand-out talent. Until the end of course, when we get a glimpse into what The Who would later become with the song A Quick One, While He's Away. This 9 minute song is all about a woman who is depressed and lonely about her man being away, and then later ends up cheating on him. The whole thing is lighthearted and just fun as hell to hear. The fact that this song is both thematically and musically a hint at what we'd later hear on Tommy makes it even greater.

15. The Doors - The Doors (1966)
Al's List Rank (#23)
Ian's List Rank (#15)

Someday we should do a list of the greatest debut albums - I bet this would be a contender for number one.

14. The Beatles - Rubber Soul (1965)
Al's List Rank (#24)
Ian's List Rank (#14)

This, along with its followups Revolver and Sgt Pepper's, create the trio of albums in the middle of The Beatles' existence that is their most universally appealing sound. This is their only album with a bit of a folk sound to it, and, like everything else they ever did, they totally nailed it.

13. The Rolling Stones - Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967)
Al's List Rank (#7)
Ian's List Rank (#58)

A lot of people don't seem to like this album where the Stones got weird - obviously we would disagree with those people. Hell, when a band puts out 20+ albums they should be applauded for trying something different every now and then - especially when it's as good as this one.

12. The Doors - Waiting For The Sun (1968)
Al's List Rank (#6)
Ian's List Rank (#66)

For our final Doors album, we have the one with great tunes like Hello, I Love You, Spanish Caravan, and The Unknown Soldier. Ironically, the song Waiting For The Sun wouldn't come out for another two years.

11. Van Morrison - Astral Weeks (1968)
Al's List Rank (#74)
Ian's List Rank (#5)

During the part of making our lists where we reveal our personal picks to each other, Al was very surprised to hear me say this one. "I didn't even know you liked Van Morrison." And....I suppose he's right? I mean, I don't DISLIKE the song Brown Eyed Girl or the album Moondance, they just don't particularly appeal to me.

Ah but Astral Weeks is something else entirely. It's an experiment, which involves using Morrison's vocals and acoustic guitar alongside some experienced jazz musicians just...going nuts and doing what Jazz musicians do. It's ALMOST a complete mess - there's a swirling of instrumental sounds going in all directions...but somehow it succeeds incredibly into a beautiful, completely unique sound. It's one of the best albums I've ever heard.

10. The Velvet Underground - White Light/White Heat (1968)
Al's List Rank (#25)
Ian's List Rank (#9)

40 albums in and we finally get to The Velvet Underground. This is probably the "coolest" VU album to like. It's not the one EVERYONE knows about, but it's also before they calmed down and started to sound more like Lou Reed's solo stuff. This is the one with the fewest tracks, which allows it to make room for longer songs like The Gift, a hilarious song about a jealous college kid who gets in a box and mails himself to his girlfriend, and Sister Ray, a 17 minute freak out song that did what so many bands tried to emulate decades later.

9. The Beatles - Magical Mystery Tour (1967)
Al's List Rank (#2)
Ian's List Rank (#54)

What is an "album"? What makes an album "official"? Or, more specifically, why isn't Magical Mystery Tour regularly cited as one of the best Beatles albums? It's not one that I've ever really looked at too closely - to me it's always just been a collection of singles with a weird history.

But when Al (unsurprisingly) placed this at number two on his list, I was forced to look deeper into the history of this album.

Magical Mystery Tour was released in the US on November 27, 1967. It had 11 songs, and is the 36 minute album that we have in their official catalog today.

The UK version was released soon after on December 8, 1967. It was a double EP with only 6 songs that ran for only 19 minutes. Because of this format, it likely just felt like a collection of singles, as each record-side only had a track or two.

In 1988, the band did a wonderful thing during the re-release of their albums onto CDs - they came up with an official discography. This was significant, as The Beatles, much like other 1960s acts like The Rolling Stones, Cream, and Donovan, had some significant differences in their US releases versus their UK releases. This meant that weird albums like The Beatles '65, The Beatles VI (huh?!), and stuff like the alternate track listings of Help! and Rubber Soul were thrown into the trash to forever just be a curiosity rather than stuff anyone would ever actually listen to. The extra songs that didn't fit in those releases all went on the Past Masters collection. Basically they went with the UK releases on everything....everything except one album - Magical Mystery Tour. For that one, they did indeed go with the US version. So if it's now officially part of their discography, is it a proper album? Well, you could argue that Past Masters probably isn't, as that was a collection of songs first released way after the fact. But the US version of Magical Mystery Tour that has become the official release WAS released back then - hell it actually came out before the UK version!

So can you call it an official BEATLES ALBUM? Well yeah I suppose you can. And when listened to as an official album...yeah it's pretty damn good. If anything, it's the greatest expression of their "Psychedelic" sound that they are known for being a part of.

Now, will I personally figure this into my thought of what the true Beatles albums are? Considering a couple things I didn't mention - that "official" US release consisted of two distinct sides of the record - the first side was the soundtrack to their recent movie, and the second was a collection of singles, many of which had been released nearly a year prior. Which to me makes it more of a compilation album of sorts. So no, I won't. But this isn't just my list. So it sits here near the top. But that's okay - regardless of whether it's an actual album or a great selection of some new songs and some singles, it's still pretty awesome.

And lastly, to offer no real closure to the topic, here is a quote I found on Wikipedia from John Lennon:

In a 1968 interview, John Lennon told Rolling Stone magazine: "It's not an album, you see. It turned into an album over here, but it was just [meant to be] the music from the film."

 8. The Beatles - The Beatles (1968)
Al's List Rank (#20)
Ian's List Rank (#8)

I've heard many times that this HUGE album that goes ALL OVER THE PLACE is really just secretly a collection of solo Beatles songs. And...sure that sounds about right. But that doesn't explain why it's leagues better than anything any of them did on their own even just a few years later. Maybe they were directly competing each other here? Either way, the results are incredible.

7. The Velvet Underground - The Velvet Underground (1969)
Al's List Rank (#5)
Ian's List Rank (#19)

 As I mentioned before, their third album was when these guys calmed down a bit. They seem like maybe they weren't trying -quite- as hard to blow your mind with some shit you've never heard, and maybe they just wanted to make some nice tunes. And because these guys were basically flawless during their short existence, the tunes on here are just as incredible as ever.
 
6. The Beatles - Abbey Road (1969)
Al's List Rank (#12)
Ian's List Rank (#7)

When we recently made our list of the Best 50 Beatles Songs, we ranked both the 8-song medley and the 7-minute song I Want You (She's So Heavy) pretty highly. So Abbey Road was pretty obviously going to rank highly...even if it does open with the worst Beatles song.

5. The Velvet Underground - The Velvet Undergound & Nico (1967)
Al's List Rank (#16)
Ian's List Rank (#2)

When I was a dumb middle schooler, other than a little bit of scratching the surface of The Beatles, I hadn't heard much 1960s stuff. I think I probably thought the thing that people would think about old music - it's important or whatever, but music has come a long way since then and the old stuff probably isn't worth bothering with today.

I'm not too upset with myself for having those dumb thoughts though, because I was busy not just listening to some of the better popular 90s stuff of the time like Nirvana and Soundgarden, but digging in deeper into the underground scene of the 80s and 90s and finding stuff like Sonic Youth, The Pixies, and Yo La Tengo. I had heard of The Velvet Underground about a thousand times...I knew that they were the BIG INFLUENCER. But like I said, I think I just assumed it would be too old to be great (I guess I had yet to figure out that all that Doors music I was listening to and enjoying at home was also from that time period).

During the following years I righted many wrongs and discovered The Beatles. And I learned that the 1960s and 70s was actually a time when music hit some significant peaks. But I kind of forgot about the Velvets until a couple years later, when a guy I worked with was telling me how great The Velvet Underground is. And I was like....err uhh yeah I know that....and quickly bought this album.

This album completely blew away any expectations I ever had about it. It's not just that this album influenced so many great bands - the crazy thing is that this album is actually BETTER than most of the music it influenced - even the really good stuff. The Velvet Underground didn't just "invent" the "underground" sound/scene/whatever - they perfected it.

 4. The Kinks - The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society (1968)
Al's List Rank (#3)
Ian's List Rank (#6)

Well would you look at that - this is actually the first album we have that was ranked in both of our top tens - this makes sense to me, as this album is basically pop-music perfection that I feel anyone should love. Every single one of these 15 songs is just so damned good. If you, my fictional reader with musical taste totally unknown to me, were to only listen to one album on this list, it should probably be this one. "You would like it!"

3. The Beatles - Revolver (1966)
Al's List Rank (#4)
Ian's List Rank (#4)

Revolver is such an unassuming album. It's not their first album, it's not a soundtrack to one of their movies, it's not their folk album, it's not the huge double album, it's not the one where they pretend to be other people, it's not their last album, it's not their OTHER last album. It's just...an album. It's strongest characteristic is probably that it was their first album to be released after they stopped touring (this is probably the secret here). Oh and that it has an AMAZING COVER.

I think this is why it took me a few years to realize that this is actually the best album they ever made. Sure, there's no cool lengthy medley here, or no Day In The Life to brilliantly close it all out. Instead, we simply have 14 songs that these guys made while they were at their peak - right in the middle of their discography. Revolver isn't just the best Beatles album, it's the best representation of who they were.

2. The Beach Boys - Pet Sounds (1966)
Al's List Rank (#8)
Ian's List Rank (#1)

Here's my personal favorite album of the 1960s - Pet Sounds. I REALLY LOVE this album. It's a strong competitor for my favorite album of all time. It's one of the few albums that I throw on when I'm not really listening to a lot of music because I'm in "Podcast Mode".

I've always thought that one of the reasons I like this one so much was because I found it at the right time. It's an album about being a young man out in the world. And young love. And I discovered this album when I was about 20 and this stuff resonated pretty hard with me. And not in some sort of negative way either - I was a very happy 19-21 year old!

The fact that my list making partner (whom I thought would just call this "Sad Bastard Music") ALSO ranked it highly reminds me that, oh yeah, these songs are actually just incredible. 

1. The Who - Tommy (1969)
Al's List Rank (#1)
Ian's List Rank (#3)

I can't think of a more appropriate album to be topping our combined list of the 1960s.

Somewhere around 2003, Al and I discovered Tommy. This was before we realized that maybe we could actually get along with each other now that we didn't live together. We were both listening to Tommy separately, simultaneously having our minds blown. We starting visiting each other, talking about how good this was, then dancing around the living room to the whole thing like idiots (yes I was twenty years old). Tommy was our lives, and that was before even seeing the movie.

But does any of this even matter if the album doesn't hold up today?

I like to think that I can look past nostalgia. I can look at some stuff that I liked when I was younger and say, yeah that's not really that great. I mean I can't do that MUCH because I had pretty great taste as a kid! But I feel like I can do it. And when I listen to this album today, I'm actually NOT reminded of Tommymania 2003. At all. I just take it for what it is. 

And it's a damn masterpiece. The Who's 1960s albums were a very clear path towards Tommy. My Generation was them saying "We are a talented rock band!" A Quick One was saying "Please listen to the title track at the end, it tells a story!", Sell Out was saying "What if an album was tied together with a unified concept?"

Which of course led to Tommy, an album that tells a story about a kid with a traumatic childhood who became deaf, dumb and blind. And got really good at pinball. And later he...well now I'm just spoiling it! Fortunately, the greatness of Tommy isn't just that it tells a nice story, it's that the songs themselves are fantastic. From the guitar crashing opening of Overture to the hypnotic fade out of Listening To You, Tommy is 5-Star Quality for 25 entire songs.

When the 1960's started, the "album" was just a musical oddity that was far less important or impactful to society than the single. But by the end of the decade, we were able to have a full hour-and-fifteen-minutes long EXPERIENCE in something like Tommy.

Stats! 

Albums per year:

1960: 2

1963: 1

1964: 2

1965: 5

1966: 9

1967: 14

1968: 6

1969: 11

So 1967 was awesome and then what the hell happened in 1968?!

Albums per band:

The Beatles: 9

The Doors: 4

Velvet Underground: 3

The Rolling Stones: 3

Bob Dylan: 2

John Coltrane: 2

Miles Davis: 2

Other stuff:

The Beatles albums that didn't make it are With The Beatles (surprising!), Yellow Submarine, and Beatles For Sale (less surprising!).

All of the 1960s output of both The Doors and The Velvet Underground made the list. All three of the Velvet albums actually made our top ten!

Three Rolling Stones albums made the list - none of which were the one on my personal list (Between The Buttons).

We only had 19 albums in common from our original personal Top 50 lists. This is very similar to our Beatles song project, where we had 18 songs in common.

The albums that were ranked the lowest by the other person were In C by Terry Riley (I guess he didn't like it?), and Happy Together by The Turtles (that's a good song but the rest didn't do it for me). Appropriately, neither made this final list.

We only shared four albums in our top tens, and 8 albums in our top twenties.

Final Thoughts:

Somehow we managed to compile this list and agree on it without murdering each other, so look forward to more of these!